#nature

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison. ↗

— Bruce Chatwin

#nature-of-man #nomad #pascal #walkabout #home

All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you. ↗

— Frances Wright

#believe #examine #faith #grounds #i

Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling locks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#ethiopia #nature #sunrise #business

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. ↗

— Hans Hoffman

#nature #art

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin’s terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#journey #nature #wanderlust #architecture

We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#homes #houses #land #nature #architecture

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough? ↗

— Vincent Van Gogh

#nature #poetry #suicide #art

The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement. ↗

— Don Roff

#funny #humor #inspirational #life #nature

The author describes how impressed she was with the detailed storyboards that outlined her movie – "not just sketches, but real art". She then describes a Hawaiian sunset as, "God painting His storyboard on the sky". ↗

— Bethany Hamilton

#nature #art

I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite? ↗

— Terry Tempest Williams

#nature #society #art